United States patent number 6,211,429 apparently gives the University of Missouri "exclusive rights to the cloned embryos, cloned fetuses, and cloned children" and "cloned products" produced by University's new process of mammalian cloning-including humans.

(Source: Andrew Pollack, "Debate on Human Cloning Turns to Patents," The New York Times, May 17, 2002; and, William Kristol, "Brave New Patents," The Weekly Standard, May 27, 2002, p. 10-11.)

"[Australian] Senator Boswell asked, 'What is the relationship between embryo research companies and the [government]?  Who owns the intellectual copyrights or patents?  What are the values of the outcomes of this research to pharmaceutical companies?'  He added, 'All we have been told so far is that embryo research is about some struggling, noble scientists who want to help sick people, yet it is so much more than that.  We cannot be naïve, we have to be well informed.'"

(Source: "Is government money funding private profit?", News Weekly, June 1, 2002, p. 3.)

Would science still be stuck with Newton if Einstein had grown up in a single-parent home? Such a question may cross the minds of readers of a new study on how social context affects a child's intellectual development. Published in Social Forces by a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this new study seeks specifically to establish to what extent "family S[ocio]E[conomic]S[tatus] characteristics affect the realization of genetic potential for intellectual development." 

Drawing on longitudinal data collected from a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7-12, the North Carolina scholars establish that a number of adverse family characteristics-including "lower family income, parental unemployment, absence of biological father, and African American [ethnicity]"-predict "lower contribution from heritability and higher contribution from shared environment to the variation in intellectual development." In other words, "it is children in disadvantaged environments who tend not to realize their potential for intellectual development." 

The authors of the new study stress that "social mobility chances" depend heavily upon "realized genetic potential for intellectual development." Accordingly, the researchers recommend that "policymakers . . . help children in disadvantaged environments realize full genetic potential for intellectual development by altering their social circumstances." Although these researchers do not spell out exactly what alterations they have in view, readers may hope for social alterations (such as intact marriages) that keep biological fathers in the home of their children. 

(Source: Guang Guo and Elizabeth Stearns, "The Social Influences on the Realization of Genetic Potential for Intellectual Development," Social Forces 80[2002]: 881-910.)